Water thieves

The thieves come in daylight, hauling off their cargo of water on carts and in buckets. Nearly everyone here is stealing water. The water sy...

The thieves come in daylight, hauling off their cargo of water on carts and in buckets. Nearly everyone here is stealing water.

The water system failed when looters stole parts from power substations after the city was taken 13 days ago. The pumps could not run, so people broke open pipes to take water, and what had been a simple problem became complicated. ‘‘If people stopped stealing we could get it back to the prewar status quo in five days,’’ said Andres Kruesi, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross sub-delegation in Basra.

But so many people are siphoning water that engineers have had to send high-salinity river water into the system to keep it flowing. More than half the population now has running water, but it is undrinkable.

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About 40 per cent has no water at all, compared with about 15 per cent before the war. Military officials say more than 200,000 gallons of drinking water is being distributed daily here, much of it from Kuwaiti tankers under British guard. But locals still stop reporters in the street to tell them the one thing they need most: ‘‘Water!’’

The problem reflects the high expectations Iraqis have of the coalition forces, and the complexities of meeting those expectations quickly. In Basra, the water stopped when the British took the city, so many people blame them, Kruesi said.

As the fighting erupted around Basra, the city’s chief water engineer Jabbar Al Haidary said he drove out to the main plant. But the plant was in the south, in the area of heaviest fighting, so the only way there was to drive toward the British as shells and mortars rained down.

‘‘The situation was difficult because there was a lot of bombing and shelling,’’ Al Haidary said. ‘‘It was a bad situation, but I was laughing. We were working on the water so why were they shooting? I had a white flag on my car.’’

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As soon as he approached the British soldiers, he said, he was arrested and marched more than two miles to a place for questioning. The British did not accept his explanation that he needed to maintain the water plant, and ordered him to return to the city, he recalled.

He tried again and managed to get across the line. He risked his life to keep the water running in wartime, only to see the problem worsen after the shelling ceased. On patrol for problems on Saturday, he found broken generators, pumps and pipes that were destroyed by explosions or spewing water geysers from bullet holes. A local welder was volunteering his services to fix the damage.

One water pipe was destroyed when retreating Iraqi forces detonated mines on a bridge. At one plant, local residents were buying fuel to run generators. Workers for the Basra Water Directorate, who are slowly returning to their jobs, somehow must plug the thousands of holes made by the water thieves. But the most difficult part is to persuade people who have no water not to break into the pipes. (LATWP)